Dotnet Core console app with NLOG in Visual Studio Code

In this post I am going to create simple minimalistic dotnet core console application and integrate it with nlog.



Let's create a folder for our project. I am going to name it nlog_console.

$mkdir nlog_console
$cd nlog_console

Now we create dotnet core console app project and if you have Visual Studio Code installed run the second command below.

$dotnet new console
$code . &

Now lets add nlog package to a project.

$dotnet add package nlog

This will add the following code to our project file.

<ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="nlog" Version="4.5.6" />
</ItemGroup>

Nlog framework requires configuration file 'nlog.config' to specify logger tagerts and rules. We can copy paste the sample nlog.config file from this github page or use one below.

xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<nlog xmlns="http://www.nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd" 
      xsi:schemaLocation="NLog NLog.xsd"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      autoReload="true"
      internalLogFile="console-example-internal.log"
      internalLogLevel="Info" >


  
  <targets>
    
    <target xsi:type="File" name="file" 
        fileName="console-example.log"
        layout="${date}|${level:uppercase=true}|${message} ${exception}|${logger}|${all-event-properties}" />
    <target xsi:type="Console" name="console"
        layout="${date}|${level:uppercase=true}|${message} ${exception}|${logger}|${all-event-properties}" />
  </targets>

  
  <rules>
    <logger name="*" minlevel="Trace" writeTo="file,console" />

  </rules>
</nlog>

'nlog.config' file need to be copied to destination directory during project build. To achieve it add the code below to a project file.

<ItemGroup>
    <None Include="nlog.config" CopyToOutputDirectory="Always" />
<ItemGroup>

Now we need to add actual logging code to a program. Copy paste the Program class code below.

using System;

namespace dotnetcore_nlog
{
    class Program
    {
        private static NLog.Logger log = NLog.LogManager.GetCurrentClassLogger();
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
            log.Trace("Loggin trace.");
        }
    }
}

To build and run our console app run code below or add launch.json config to Visual Studio Code.

$dotnet build
$dotnet run

You should see the following output and log file created in the same directory as our console app.

2018/06/19 18:48:13.130|TRACE|Loggin trace. |nlog_console.Program|

References:

• Getting started with .NET Core 2 Console application


• Sample dotnet core console app with nlog on github